Learn how to use surveys to measure morale and keep employees happy.

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Why should you measure employee satisfaction?

Everyone wants to love their job, right? After all, if you’re going to spend the majority of your waking hours at work you should feel happy there.

Employee satisfaction is predicated on understanding how many of your employees enjoy working for you. Are your employees happy? Are they satisfied with their benefits and day-to-day demands? Stop guessing and find out with an employee satisfaction survey.

What exactly can you measure?

Employee surveys are valuable for learning about several topics, all of them directly related to employee morale, satisfaction, and involvement with the company.

Health benefits, wellness programs, compensation, managers’ performance, career development, work environment: These are all areas you can investigate in depth with a well-designed employee satisfaction survey.

Tips for getting employee feedback

Once you’ve found the right questions to ask, it’s important to make sure you get as many responses as possible to get the most reliable feel on how things are going at the office.

The following are some tips to make sure your survey on employee morale is successful.

Guarantee employees’ confidentiality. Your team members need the reassurance that their views will be confidential. You want them to be as honest as possible when they take your survey, so also consider making the survey anonymous to increase their sense of security.

Use clear language. Avoid using buzzwords and corporate language that employees may not understand. Your surveys should read like a human conversation to invite sincere feedback.

Avoid tinkering with the words. Keep the wording constant between surveys and from year to year. This way you can be sure of measuring the same aspects of your company’s culture all the time.

Use technology to your advantage. An online survey with the right follow-up tools can help guarantee high levels of participation. SurveyMonkey’s Analyze tool can help you interpret the results you get.

What to do with your feedback data

A survey of your employees’ views on company morale is a good thing to have. You should present the results to the team and make changes to company policies if necessary.

But you know what’s better? Conducting many successive surveys that you can compare to one another over time.

Benchmark your surveys. Once you’ve done one survey, you’ve taken the first step toward understanding employee satisfaction over the long term. When you send repeated surveys, each survey will be more valuable as you compare it to previous ones. You can also make comparisons between departments to know exactly which one needs immediate attention.

Find external benchmarks, too. Maybe 67% of your employees say they are inspired to meet their goals at work. Is that good or bad? It may not be easy to think about that other 33%, but you’d feel better knowing that you are in the 99th percentile among American companies. SurveyMonkey offers benchmarks like this on the employee engagement survey template (and many more) so you know where you stand compared to your peers.

The difference between employee satisfaction and engagement

Employee engagement has recently become a trending topic among human resources professionals. This doesn’t mean that employee satisfaction stopped being important overnight. In general, you can think of employee engagement as a deeper, multidimensional concept that encompasses other measures in addition to satisfaction.

SurveyMonkey created an employee engagement survey that aims to capture that deeper level of connection between an employee and their company.

Employee satisfaction depends on many different factors, generally related to the concrete conditions of everyday life at the office and the benefits and compensation the team members receive in return for their time and hard work.

There are many ways in which employees can love their job. If you want to be sure that you have a highly motivated team, you need to start counting those ways.

You can choose one of our templates below to get started.

Various employee satisfaction survey templates

To see how you can effectively measure each of the factors affecting employee morale at your company, you can check out some of our employee surveys. The following are just a few examples from our library.

Inclusion and Belonging

Building a workplace culture that prioritizes belonging and inclusion is the best way to attract diverse and talented people, create a sustainable workforce, and—most importantly—make employees feel supported. SurveyMonkey’s inclusion and belonging survey template can help you understand what you’re doing well and where there’s room for growth.